14 DAY TRIAL // New IPs are a genuine risk, even more so this year, now that the gaming industry has seen a rather brutal collapse. Games haven't been doing all that horribly compared to other years, and the big franchises have still sold big, Modern Warfare is a testament to that. In what should be the worse year for games, the second installment in the MW series managed to become the biggest entertainment release in history.
But publishers have been cutting back on costs like crazy, firing thousands of people and shutting down studios altogether. So, risks are not something on anybody's mind right know and, even if sequels and remakes are the thing this year, some titles just weren't made to come back.
While Capcom has resurrected a lot of its games through the Xbox Live Arcade, Nintendo's Wii Virtual Console and the PlayStation Network, one title that fans were really hoping to see strung up by the puppeteer and reanimated won't be seeing salvation. The classic PS1 knuckle-buster, Rival Schools: United by Fate, is one of the games that will forever remain as a shelled memory. The idea of a remake was brought up before, but now it received an official response from Capcom.
Answering a forum question, Capcom's Christian Svensson said that there were several issues with the game as far as copyrights went, so it looks like the company can't really evolve it, even if it wants to.
“There are IP clearances and rights we no longer have,” Svensson said, “(particularly pertaining to voicework/soundtrack I believe) so our IP management group has told us it can't be re-release. I'm sorry as it's one of the ones I really wanted to see be put back up. So if you still have that PS1 Rival Schools disc in your collection, it's unfortunately going to be the only way that gets played for the foreseeable future.”